Peter's Blog

Following my flirtation with mythtv I decided to try a windows based solution again.

Here are the events so far:

• Installed windows and the hauppauge stuff for the Nova-t USB2.
• Tuned it in and it worked, can watch telly.
• Downloaded Yahoo Go but it didn't work because I am not in the US.
• Discovered that the latest version of Nero now supports the Nova-t USB2. Installed that and indeed it does. Had a couple of issues with it though:
  • the EPG that comes with it is reasonably comprehensive but for some reason decided not to list 'The Matrix' which was playing that night. Expect random missing entries in the EPG.
  • when I did record something, the playback was not very good quality: as if it is trying to software encode the recording instead of storing the raw mpeg2 stream that comes out of the nova-t like WinTV2000 does (this is a guess).
• Tried using the Hauggauge 'Scheduler' to make a recording but it didn't work. The scheduler is just a front end for adding entries to the Windows Task Scheduler so I looked at the entry it created to see where it went wrong. Because I wanted a background recording the schedule entry tried to run a program called 'BGRecord.exe' which didn't exist. When I changed the scheduler to make a non-background recording it lauched WinTV2000 to do the recording and was successful on a short test.
• Scheduled recording of 'Matrix Revolutions' and when I went back to see how it went WinTV had locked up, along with most of windows.

Conclusion: get sky+.

I still want to set up a system what will automatically record tv programs for playback on my pocketpc. For various reasons this is becoming more important: in a nutshell, I can only take so much ITV.

Been trying to setup mythtv on a new pc I have acquired. I have tried various windows PVR packages in the past but none of them were attractive, being flaky and annoying (including meedio which of now available for free as yahoo go). Mythtv was attractive because of it's flexibility.

I installed a clean kubuntu install in the box which went quite smoothly and after some exploration I established that the kernel already supported my hauppauge nova-t usb. I found an application called kaffeine that was already installed which was able to display tv and this essentially Just Worked out-of-the-box, albeit with lip-sync issues (probably because it needs the proprietary nvidia drivers).

Still desiring mythtv, I found an ubuntu repository that has mythtv packages for version 0.18 and installed that. I looked in the ubuntu package readme which says something to the effect that whoever set it up had no experience with mythtv and didn't know what he was doing. Thanks for the warning. I set it up using the mythtv-setup application, started the mythtv backend and tried to start mythweb. I am mainly interested in this as a way of remotely scheduling recordings, I care not about using the myth frontend. Mythweb wouldn't work, it complained about being a different version to the back end. The php code appears to display this error if there are any problems communicating with the back end but I decided I wouldn't mess around getting an old version to work, I would build the latest 0.19. After a few hours of installing dependant packages it built but when I tried running it I got a segmentation error. At this point I gave up with mythtv, I just don't have the time to nurse it into life. mythtv seems bloated and fragile. there is the option of knoppmyth, a dedicated mythtv distribution, but I'm not sure how cutting edge this is, whether it is any good as a general purpose linux distribution or whether the kernel will support my tv card without having to fiddle with compiling it.

I had a brief look at freevo but sourceforge was down (what an advert for oss) but found that freevo used command line tools to do the recording so I am currently investigating that approach: knocking up simple python scripts to do just what I want. I would rather debug these than mythtv (hell is other peoples source code).

Incidentally, I was browsing through some ruby source yesterday and for a few files there I was wondering whether ruby had a comment character.

I don't really like gbpvr: the user interface is designed to be used on a TV whereas I want to use it on a pc to schedule recordings, then play them back using one of any number of media player apps that are available, even on my k750i phone. Most media applications are designed to be used on a TV so have clunky minimalist user interfaces that are just annoying. gbpvr's xmltv program guide is typically blank for BBC1 after the next program and the navigation is poor (e.g. no scroll bars to scroll up and down through 65 channels).

I gave mediaportal a try but it has another user interface designed for TV: it relies on moving the mouse cursor above and below the five line menu to make it scroll and it is just too fiddly. While playing TV the screen faded to black whenever I moved the mouse: feature or bug? I decided bug and uninstalled it. As an application it is not far removed from gbpvr. Neither seem to have the obvious facility to select a channel from a menu, or if they do it is hard to find. Any buttons implemented in the user interfaces tend to be fiddly and unresponsive, probably because they do not use vanilla Windows controls.

I have a renewed interest in DigiGuide now. It does have a very good program planner with lots of search options. It supports a plugin architecture that can be used to get it to schedule recordings and there is already a plugin that supports the Hauppauge WinTV Nova-t USB2: right click on a program to schedule a recording. Such as system uses conventional windows applications and should be nicer to use (context menus!) with less fiddling around. I think it is also conceivable to schedule sky+ recordings from digiguide.

Theoretically I can schedule recordings by setting up scheduled events in the Windows Task Scheduler, I may even be able to do this from python. This opens up the dream of sending an SMS from my mobile to set up a recording (sky+ are planning to set up a service like this). Digiguide also has a web access feature that might be able to do this.

Update: found DGScript which lets me run the python script of my choice from a digiguide event. We have the technology...

Also found DABdig which will record from Digiguide. This works with WinTV2000.